III
Post-Mortem on Bliss
Lew Wanger left the cab with its door teetering open and elbowed his way through the small knot of muted onlookers who had collected about it. “What is it?” he asked the cop, showing him something from a vest pocket.
“Cash in.” The patrolman pointed almost vertically. “From up there to down here.”
Somebody’s midnight edition of tomorrow morning’s paper had been requisitioned, expanded with its component leaves spread end to end and formed into a mound along the ground. One foot, in a patent-leather evening oxford, stuck out at one corner.
“I understand they’re having a blowout up there. Probably had a drink too many, leaned too far over and lost his balance.” He tipped a section of the news sheet back, for Wanger’s benefit.
One of the spectators, who hadn’t been expecting this and was standing too close, turned his head aside, cupped a precautionary hand to his mouth and backed out in a hurry.
“Well, what’d y’expect, violets?” the cop called after him antagonistically.
Wanger squatted down on his heels and began to knead at a rigidly contracted fist that was showing at the upper right-hand corner of the mound. He finally extracted what looked like a swirl of frozen black smoke.
“Dame’s handkerchief,” supplied the cop.
“Scarf,” corrected Wanger. “Too big for a handkerchief.”
He looked down again at the shrouded body.
“I know him by sight,” the night doorman of the building supplied. “I think they were announcing his engagement to their daughter tonight, up at the Elliotts’. That’s the penthouse—”
“Well, I’d better get up there and get it over with,” Wanger sighed. “Just routine; probably won’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes at the most.”
At daybreak he was still hammering at the disheveled, exhausted guests ranged before him. “And do you mean to say there’s not one of you here even knew this girl’s name or had never seen her before tonight?” All heads kept shaking dully.
“Didn’t anyone ask her name? What kind of people are you, anyway?”
“We all did at one time or another,” a dejected man said. “She wouldn’t give it. Passed it off each time with some crack like ‘What’s in a name?’ ”
“O.K., then she was a gate-crasher, pure and simple. Now what I want to find out is why, what her motive was.” Marjorie’s mother came back into the room at this point, and he turned to her. “How about it, any valuables missing, anything stolen from the apartment?”
“No,” she sobbed, “not a thing’s been touched. I just got through checking up.”
“Then robbery wasn’t the motive for the intrusion. She seems to have avoided and discouraged all the rest of you young fellows all evening long, according to what you say; singled Bliss out as soon as there was a chance of getting him alone. Yet according to what you say” — he turned to Corey — “he didn’t seem to recognize her from the description passed on to him by the doorman at his own flat. And when he arrived here and finally saw her, he acted as though she was a perfect stranger to him. That is, assuming it was the same girl.
“That’s about all there is to be done up here for the present. Has anyone anything to add to this description you’ve given me of her?”
No one had; she had been seen by so many people, it was exhaustive in itself. As the guests filed mournfully out one by one, giving their names and addresses in case they should be wanted for further questioning, Corey edged up to Wanger. He was full of drink and cold sober at the same time. “I was his best friend,” he said huskily, “How do you see it? What do you figure it for?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Wanger answered as he prepared to leave, “not that you’re entitled to be taken into my confidence any more than anyone else. There isn’t anything to show that it wasn’t an accident — but one thing. The fact that she cleared out of here so fast right after it happened, instead of staying to face the music like all the rest of you. Another very incriminating piece of behavior is that when she met Miss Elliott in the doorway and the latter asked her if she’d seen him, she calmly answered that he was out there, instead of screaming blue murder that he’d just gone over, which was the normal thing to do. There’s always a possibility, of course, that he didn’t go over until after she’d already left him and gone inside. But what argues against that is that he took that black scarf of hers down with him. That makes it look very much as though she was still with him at the actual instant it happened. Yet she could have dropped it or even given it to him to hold for her, then gone in.
“You see, the thing is fifty-fifty so far; everything you can bring to bear on one side balances nicely with something you can bring to bear on the other. What’ll finally tip the scales one way or the other, as far as I’m concerned, is her ultimate behavior. If she comes forward within a day or two to identify or clear herself, as soon as she hears we’re looking for her, the chances are it’ll turn out to have been an accident and she ran out simply to escape the notoriety, knowing she had no right up here. If she remains hidden and we have to go out hunting for her, I think we can say murder and not be very far from right.”
He pocketed the description and other data he’d taken down. “We’ll get her, either way, don’t worry.”
But they didn’t.
Evening Accessories Department, Bonwit Teller Department Store, fifteen days later:
“Yes, this is our twelve-dollar wimple. The only place it could have been purchased is here; it’s a special with us.”
“All right, now call your sales staff in here. I want to find out if any of them remembers selling one to a woman whose description follows—”
And when they’d assembled and he’d repeated it three times over, a mousy little person with glasses stepped forward. “I...I remember selling one of these numbers in black, to a beautiful girl answering that description, a little over two weeks ago.”
“Good! Dig up the sales slip. I want the address it was sent to.”
Fifteen minutes later: “The customer paid cash and took it with her; no name or address was given.”
“Is that the customary way you make these sales?”
“No, they’re a luxury item; they’re usually delivered. In this case it was at the customer’s special request that she took it right along with her, I remember that.”
Wanger (under his breath): “To cover her tracks.”
Wanger’s report to his superior, three weeks later:
“...And not a trace of her since. Not a sign to show who she was, where she came from, where she went. Nor why she did it — if she did it. I’ve investigated Bliss’ past exhaustively, checked back almost to the first girl he ever kissed, and she doesn’t appear anywhere in it. The testimony of the doorman at his flat, and of his friend Corey, seems to show that he did not know this girl, whoever she was. Yet she deliberately discouraged and shunned everyone else at this party, until she had maneuvered to get him alone out on that terrace. So mistaken identity won’t jibe, either.
“In short, the only indication it was not an accident is the strange behavior of this mystery woman and her subsequent disappearance and refusal to come forward and clear up the matter. On the other hand, other than the above, there is no positive indication it was murder, either.”